Resurgent Forms in Ivan Goncharov and Alexander Veselovsky: Toward a Historical Poetics of Tragic Realism

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I would like to summon historical poetics, as delineated by Alexander Veselovsky in particular, in order to shed light on the function of some oddly atavistic but crucial sections of Ivan Goncharov's last novel, The Precipice (Obryv, 1869). The sections, I will argue, have been unjustifiably dismissed by generations of critics as simply falling short of Goncharov's realist best. An approach informed by the methodology of historical poetics, however, allows us to read them as key to the formation of Goncharov's particular brand of “tragic realism,” a paradoxical but exigent and fruitful hybrid, born of the formal and thematic contradictions of the late realist novel. In the second part of this article, I reverse the direction of the inquiry to suggest some ways in which The Precipice, read through the prism of historical poetics, can reveal the symbolic‐affective stakes of Veselovsky's own project. This will involve having historical poetics interrogate itself – an undertaking Veselovsky would perhaps have been open to and one that allows us to appreciate significant historically rooted parallels between these roughly contemporary projects: the methodology and the novel.